As Iraq bakes in the blistering summer heat, its hardscrabble farmers and livestock herders are battling severe water shortages that are killing their animals, fields and way of life.

As it moved toward Florida's Gulf Coast early Wednesday, Elsa weakened to a tropical storm, though it still barreled inland with gusty winds and heavy rains, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

The desperate search for survivors in a Japanese resort town devastated by a landslide is becoming less hopeful, officials warned Tuesday, three days after the disaster that killed at least seven people.

The fate or whereabouts of 27 residents of Atami in central Japan remains unknown, a regional spokesman said, after dozens of homes were swept away on Saturday by violent waves of mud.

New Zealand recorded its hottest June on record as temperatures continued to soar in a pattern consistent with global warming, a government scientific agency said Tuesday.

Emergency services in Azerbaijan on Monday were gauging the environmental fallout of a mud volcano eruption in the Caspian Sea, the latest occurrence of the natural phenomenon in the oil-rich nation.

The eruption occurred Sunday evening near the island of Dashlyg in the vicinity of offshore oil and gas fields, with plumes of fire reaching 100 meters (330 feet) above the sea, Azerbaijan's national seismological center said in a statement.

Firefighters in Cyprus said Monday they had brought under control the island's worst blaze on record, which ripped through mountain forests and farmland, killing four people and destroying scores of homes. 

Water-bombing planes from Greece and Israel and British aircraft from bases on the Mediterranean island helped douse the huge fire, which blackened 55 square kilometers (21 square miles) of the Troodos Mountains.

Huge solar panels poke out of pumpkin and tomato fields in Syria's rebel-held northwest, where after infrastructure was destroyed during a decade of war, many have switched to renewable energy.

Cyprus search crews discovered the bodies of four people outside a fire-swept mountain village on Sunday in what a government minister called the "most destructive" blaze in the east Mediterranean island nation's history.

Nicos Nouris said that Civil Defense volunteers discovered the remains just outside the village of Odou on the southern edge of the Troodos mountain range.

Two bodies were found after a huge landslide at a resort town in central Japan swept away homes on Saturday following days of heavy rain, with around 20 people still missing, officials said.

Canada's government has warned of a "long and challenging summer" ahead as it prepared military aircraft to help evacuate towns and fight more than 100 wildfires fueled by a record-smashing heat wave.